oh wow the glass-tower office buildings we constructed when we thought air conditioning and central heating would never have downsides...have downsides?

and we're still building them?

while the Victorian house museum where I work, with thick walls and small windows and big wooden shutters stays ~10 degrees above (winter) or below (summer) the outside temperature for days on end with no help at all?

uh. okay then

If the Please Do Not Eat That Professional thinks it's inconsequential enough to be funny, then the concerned caller knows it's no big deal. When I was a kid my mom called poison control because I ate not one but several crayons, and their advice was to make sure I didn't stray too far from a toilet for a few hours because suppositories are made of wax, too.

Also several years ago I ate half a sandwich while wondering why the hell it tasted so funny only to realize the Goo Gone I'd been cleaning with was leaking, and did so onto my sandwich. Poison Control now has an online form where you can put in what you ingested/how much/when/etc. and someone basically triages those out, so the kid who just drank a bunch of drain cleaner isn't in line behind the kid who ate a crayon. I got a call like twenty minutes later from a nurse who told me I was fine.

Oh! And if you want to know what the tool looks like, it now gives a "this is not a real case" option to let you test it out, so I became a hypothetical worried patient who accidentally took 1000mg of ibuprofen (max dose should be 800) instead of 1000mg of acetaminophen (which has a max dose of 1000) and ran the entire thing. It took me less than two minutes from this:

To this:

Below this screenshot I was advised to drink some water and that if symptoms developed in the next four hours, I should only be concerned in certain cases (e.g. nausea is normal, heart palpitations are a problem).

So what if it's a serious problem? Suddenly, hypothetical Nina was cleaning xir bathroom sink and got hit with some Drano splashback with xir eyes and mouth open! Here's what the tool suggested. As soon as I selected that I'd gotten Drano in my eyes, this popped up:

So I hypothetically went to rinse my eyes, came back, and indicated it'd also gotten into my mouth and onto my skin. Here was the result:

And finally, hypothetical!Nina made an extremely bad decision, then decided this wasn't how xe wanted things to end after all. So I selected the option that says I'd attempted self-harm, and this popped up. (I didn't get it in the screenshot, but there's a drawing of a sad snail at the top of the screen. I think it's supposed to remind you someone is there, this just isn't the best route to reach them.)

It’s okay to sit down while doing anything in the kitchen. You don’t even need to be disabled or chronically ill. Your feet do not need any excuses. Rest them

It’s okay to cut potatoes in front of the tv while sitting on the couch.

Abled folks could learn a lot from the measures disabled folks take to adapt to their conditions and hack their environment and daily tasks so it benefits them in all the possible ways.

I just read a Fortune article the other day about the fact that some college students can't read a single sentence. One. They cannot parse the meaning of a single sentence. That's terrifying. (Here it is on Yahoo without the paywall, btw.)

The thing is that you do not have to be wholly illiterate to struggle with reading. About half of Americans have low literacy, meaning they read around a sixth grade level or less.

This puts publishers in a terrible position. They need to sell books to an audience that cannot read books made for adults but that doesn't want the simplicity of grade-school books. The books need real adult problems without the nuance, hence the therapy speak and the black-and-white thinking.

Another thing is that cognitive flexibility influences literacy, meaning the reverse is also true; cognitive inflexibility determines lower literacy. Cognitive flexibility is the ability to update your schemas or combine multiple pieces of information without being expressly told to do so. It also impacts whether you can identify the mismatch between what someone says and what they do, which is the gold standard way to avoid therapy speak.

Poor cognitive flexibility means you can't have messy situations, because then the reader doesn't know what to think. Everyone has to be sorted into Good Person and Bad Person, and if the Good Person does something that may seem Bad, then they become a Bad Person unless the text assures us that they are still Good.

You will see many positive Goodreads reviews for these books. I'm not saying every single person with a positive review for a book like that has low literacy, but it's more likely than not. The same thing that drives you insane is what compels other readers who can't handle more complex texts.

Basically what I am saying is that if you want something with nuance, as a reader or a writer, you probably need to seek out selfpub stuff. I know that a lot of selfpub is garbage specifically because of the lower barrier to entry, and a lot of good selfpub stuff is not highly rated because getting reviews takes time and energy.

(I'd like to say my own stuff is good but doesn't have a lot of reviews because that requires active solicitation and I'm busy. I'm competing with millions of authors, both selfpub and tradpub, who have larger budgets. Anyway.)

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Source

"Absolutely no one comes to save us but us."

twelve episodes, twelve contestants - a mix of annoying middle aged sci fi authors, fan fic authors and random people off the street

a variety of against the clock writing tasks, big finish scripts, ability to interact with actors without shouting at them and challenges where you have no budget or doctor for an episode

judged by solely by christopher eccleston